I had heard from various English professors about how depressing and sad Thomas Hardy’s novels are with various quips like “everyone gets married in Austen and everyone dies in Hardy.” After reading Tess of The D’Ubervilles, I didn’t feel that sad or depressed. It seemed less like a tragedy than an inevitable resolution to a situation. Besides the fact that she is in a Hardy novel, which I was told could not end well, Tess is a woman in the 19th century—a poor woman in the 19th century—a woman who loses her virginity in the 19th century. It couldn’t be good. While reading Tess I certainly felt depressed as I was forced to watch her slow and painful journey towards death, but after reading the last few pages where Angel and Liza-Lu watch Tess’s hanging from a distance and a few sentences later they simply walk on to continue their lives, I find myself as the reader easily moving on as well. This insensitiveness to Tess’s death is something I believe Hardy wants us to feel. Yes, we were enveloped in her individual story for 400 pages or so, but in the end, just as we suspected, she died just as we all will.
Even Tess realizes that her story is not unique. When Angel offers to teach her some history, Tess replies: “Sometimes I feel I don’t want to know anything more about it than I already know…Because what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only—finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that’s all” (Oxford World Classic 2005 edition, 142). In fact throughout the novel we are reminded of the story of Adam and Eve. Tess, undoubtedly is Eve as she falls victim to Alec’s devices in the woods, and Alec is undoubtedly the devil who openly admits that he is bad and is even seen holding a pitchfork at one point. Angel is, of course, and an angelic figure of good, who Tess ultimately cannot be with because of her sin with Alec. It is not that simple, however. Angel is also an Adam figure at one point in a Garden of Eden setting at Talbothay’s with what he believes to be an innocent Eve. So, in a way, Tess gets a second chance at Eden, but that second chance is doomed to fail.
Tess is too human, and not enough of the spiritual ideal Angel wants to see in her. Even when Angel comes down off his cloud after going to Brazil and loves Tess in the flesh, Tess knows that her happiness with him cannot last because she knows, just as the reader knows, that she is doomed from the beginning. Waking up from the altar at Stonehenge where she has been sleeping, she says to Angel when the police come to take her away: “Angel—I am almost glad—yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted—it was too much—I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me” (418). Her sense that her happiness could not last seems tied to the Christian idea of original sin. She was a sinner from the beginning, even if she did not choose that fate. Worse, in a Puritan sense, she is a sinner who is not one of the elect as the natural signs around her have suggested throughout the novel. More interestingly the novel is filled with pagan images in relation to Tess like the stone pillar at “Cross-in-Hand” that Alec makes her swear never to tempt him again and Stonehenge where she falls asleep on the altar that was once used for sacrifices, suggesting that Tess was never a part of the Christian world.
It seems that Tess is more of the flesh and blood of the natural world rather than the spiritual world. She is tied to the land throughout the novel. Hardy often points to Tess’s realization that Nature and Society are in conflict with one another. When Tess wakes up from her night in the leaves hiding from the man on the road (who turns out to be farmer Groby), she finds a bunch of birds who have been wounded by hunters and died in the night. Hardy says, “she was ashamed of herself for her gloom of the night, based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature” (298). Tess had been lamenting her lonely and unjust separation from Angel, but seeing the actual death of these birds she realizes her sorrow is a false construction. Nature in this sense is the cycle of living and dying—physical existence. Tess realizes her sorrow is an artificial one because it would not exist without society. Even Tess’s own nature as a woman is constructed by both Angel, who sees in her an idealized pureness related to nature, and Alec, who sees her only in her physical and sexual nature. Tess is trapped by both of these views of her nature, which ultimately kill her just as the birds are killed unnaturally by hunters.
The result of this conflict between the real physical reality of Nature and the artificial societal construction of Nature for Tess is that she often combines the two, so that physical Nature reflects the artificial Nature of her social condemnation. For example, after secretly listening to Angel play his harp in the garden (a natural and realistic garden of Eden in its imperfection as Hardy describes it as “rank” with “weeds emitting offensive smells” but “dazzling as that of cultivated flowers” all the same) he discovers her as she begins to retreat and asks her if she is afraid. She replies that she is not afraid of “outdoor things” but “life in general” (139). He asks her “how is it” that she thinks so, and she replies:
“The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they?—that is, seem as if they had. And the river says ‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?” And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and the clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me!” (140).
Tess’s pessimistic reading of Nature as a reflection of the human condition has what Angel refers to as “the ache of modernism” (140). He is surprised to find such ideas in a milkmaid, but “the perception arrested him less when he reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in definition—a more accurate expression, by words in –logy and –ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries” (140).
This concept of ideas existing in the human subconscious for centuries until they are “realized” and defined goes back to the idea of cycles that Hardy hints at in the ending when Liza-lu and Angel walk on after Tess’s death to continue a new cycle. Other writers of the period, like William Butler Yeats, express the same sense of the cyclical nature of life and some sort of universal subconscious, which Yeats calls the “Spiritus Mundi,” which connects all people past and present. In his poem “The Second Coming,” Yeats debunks the Christian idea that the second coming of Christ will end the world. Instead the “second coming” is merely the end of one cycle of life and the beginning of another. In this sense of life, Tess’s death may not seem as tragic because it does not mean much in the relation to these endless cycles. On the other hand, Tess’s death is even more tragic because it means that others will have the same fate in future never ending cycles.
This idea of never ending cycles is reminiscent of Eastern philosophy found in Hinduism and Buddhism of samsara—the endless and meaningless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth that humans must overcome. In the Hindu sense, Yeats’s idea of the “Spiritus Mundi,” is related to the idea of the Atman—the ultimate reality underlying all humanity. In Buddhist terms, this would also be something similar to Nirvana. Both require enlightenment, which comes from breaking through some illusion of reality in order to escape the endless cycles of reincarnation. In Buddhism, unhappiness comes from suffering, which comes from desire. All of human life is suffering because there is a nagging sense of incompleteness and the problem of impermanence. Change cannot be controlled as Tess so aptly demonstrates in her tree metaphor. The cause of this suffering is the desire to fill this gap of incompleteness and to find permanence. The problem is that nothing is permanent, and the more you gain the more you have to lose, so even when you believe you are happy, you are really unhappy because you know that happiness cannot last. Tess also expresses this feeling when she tells Angel “this happiness could not have lasted” at the end just before the police take her away. By realizing this impermanence, Tess seems to be released from her suffering. She is “ready” for death; she has given up her desire for life. I don’t know if this would be considered enlightenment, but Tess’s sense of Nature beyond society, her sense of tragic connection with others like her in the past, and her sense of her own fated impermanence suggests that if Hardy had given her a Buddhist terminology instead of a Christian one, she might have found more peace before death.
Here are some words of wisdom from the Buddhist text, The Dhammapada:
“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.”
“But he whose mind is calm self-control is free from the lust of desires, who has risen above good and evil, he is awake and has no fear.”
“When a man considers this world as a bubble of froth, and as an illusion of an appearance, then the king of death has no power over him.”
“From passion arises sorrow and from passion arises fear. If a man is free from passion, he is free from fear and sorrow.”
“There is no fire like lust, and no chains like those of hate. There is no net like illusion, and no rushing torrent like desire.”
